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Daddy Trails

Three wishes, three fathers, and a DNA fairy-tale ending.

I had a solitary childhood given to fanciful imaginings, enterprising explorations, ancillary unintentional mistreatment, and three secret wishes. The third of those wishes was to have my very own father. We would share a name, unequivocal love, and be a family.

My step-dad raised me, loved me, and gave me foundational strengths upon which my character was built. But his alcoholism and abuse of my mother shrouded our relationship and darkened his place in my heart.

In spite of his addiction, we had grand times together as he taught me life lessons that would serve me well. I ached for him to be my real father and give me his name. For reasons known only to him that never came to pass. My soul reached out to that other Father who was out there somewhere in the world.  I vowed to find that name printed in the Father space on my birth certificate.

I yearned for a kind and loving world where daddy-daughter dates were common, and everyone was sober.  I thought that other Father, the one nestled in my mind and in my heart, would give me that world, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After a lifetime of searching for my long-imagined perfect birth-certificate father, I removed the wrapping on this marvelous gift and discovered the dismal reality. There would be no love forthcoming from this narcissistic psychopathic murderer.

This man who had been the object of my love and adoration throughout childhood, parenthood, and adulthood became the horrific unimaginable culmination of finally finding my father. He was the worst kind of person and was so far removed from my idealistic dad that I felt pummeled and bruised to my very core.

Then I took a DNA test.  When I received the results it was like opening a letter from the travel agency expecting my ticket to Scotland and instead getting a ticket to Mexico. Ancestry’s conclusions that I was of Spanish/Mexican descent had to be a mistake.

My family’s genealogy was complete for generations past and there was not one hint or trace of Hispanics. For many months amusement and denial kept this revelation in the background.

Then my birth-certificate dad’s family jumped on the DNA apple cart, and I was conspicuously missing from their family tree.  Suddenly my self-portrait went out of focus. I lost my equilibrium as I tried in vain to connect my family branches to theirs.

It became evident that I did not belong to them; so to whom did I belong?  If birth-certificate dad was not my father, who was?

My search for a daddy is a genuine fairy-tale. I had to hack my way through a spikey tangled forest and confront the malevolent dragon, but I got my third secret wish and at long last, by the Grace of God, that haunting, empty chamber in my heart was filled with a real father.